Shaun White
QA Tester
Games Designer
MY GAMING LIFE
I have been playing games since a young age. The first game I played was Banjo Kazooie on the N64. It's still one of my favourite games I've played. My favourite part of it is in the first level, when you play as kazooie and walk up the side of the hill, collecting all the music notes.
I've played alot of games, and game franchises since then. My favourite franchises are Mass Effect, Hitman and Splinter Cell. Mass Effect for the powers, the combat and the story. Hitman for the gameplay, which my play style is to simply kill everyone. Splinter Cell for the stealth, gadgets and devices, and the choices of how to complete objective.
I primarily play Xbox, playing over 300 games across my Xbox One and Xbox 360. I mainly play first person and third person shooters. I prefer open worlds over seperate levels, but I'll happily play both. My favourite game in terms of how it was designed and developted would be Dying Light; an open world parkour game, with visceral melee combat with zombies, with an amazing atmosphere and amazing gameplay. It's also my perfect example of how DLC should be made.
MY COURSE
I finished my Bachelor of Games Development course in May 2016. I majored in Games Design. During my course, I gained a new appreciation for how games are made. Specifically, how the games are tested and checked to make sure everything works. Alot of things go into a game; the levels/ worlds themselves, animations, programming, audio, alot of things. Someones gotta check it all works; everything works when it's meant to.
My favourite part of developing small games is doing Quality Assurance - QA - tasks. I stronly enjoying play games, or even small section of a game, repeatedly to check everything is working as it is, and checking for any bugs, or glitches. I've found I'm particulary good at QA tasks, or bug checking as I like to call it, as I like doing everything in the game that I can. I like to walk/ move against all the walls in a level, push every button in the game, and do things I'm not meant to/ do things early, just to see what happens and to see if anything 'breaks'.
This has also casued me to change my view on bugs and glitches in games when I play them. Not every bug or glitched will be found during development. A player might do someone the developers didn't do, and thus a new bug is found. I mean, sure, bigger studio will have more people testing the game, but even then, not all bugs and glitches will be found.
ESCAPING SQUARE
Imade 8 small games during my course. Secenwere made in the Unity game engine, one was made using UDK. While most of these have been released on Itch.io, my crowning achievement is Ecasping Square.
Escaping Square is an autorunner where the player jumps from platform to platform. When the player reaches a specific score, the platforms become smaller, and the players' maximum speed increases. This occurs twice, assuming the player can ahieve these scores. There also numerous mods the player can acitvate that change how the game is played, and there are numnerous goals for the player to achieve. This is my crowning achievement for multiple reasons.
The first being that it's the first game I released on the Windows Store. It's avaliable for free on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Yay.
The second reason being how I programmed the platforms and the spawning of boosts ans obstables, if they're activated in the mods. The platforms are created randomly as the player crosses them; they're created at a random height, a random distance from the previous platform, and with a random length. All these variables arent random between a set maximum and minimum. Using length as an example; At the start, the platforms are generated with a random length between 12 and 15. At a certain point, those numbers decrease, result in shorter platforms.
How the platforms spawn is also pretty awesome. There's only ever six platforms in the game; when the player moves a certain distance away from the previous platform, it gets destroyed, and a new one is generated.
It took me around two weeks to get the platforms doing this. I watched alot of youtube tutorials on random generation, and look at alot of example code online. It took awhile, but eventually I got the platforms to work as they do in the game.
Getting the boosts and obstacles to spawn was almost at difficult. Coding them to spawn on random platforms, at a certain height above the platforms, and making sure they dont both spawn on the same platform, was mor difficult then I originally though. So again, I returned to youtube and watched alot of tutorial videos. Eventually I got it.
ABOVE: An obstacles
BELOW: A boost
